RE: [Algorithms] Terrain performance comparrisons

[Daniel D. <du...@ya...>]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Tom Forsyth wrote:

-->If you have any specific questions, I'm sure we'll be happy to help :-)

I have some questions :)

I took it upon myself to try to analyze the modern contenders for "terrain 
engine of the year" to see if any of them performed as a panacea in the realms 
of quality and performance.  Having been frustrated by the algorithm of the 
week syndrome that seems to prevail; I figured I'd wind up needing to have a 
couple easily swappable plugins for our engine (maybe even needing to switch 
between algorithms depending on the context).

I'm really trying to come up with a general solution for a general game 
engine (even if that "general" solution is a set of swappable plugins that 
present an identical, or similar, interface.)

The questions:

what are the major contending algorithms for modern systems?
the three I've decided to try out are ChunkedLOD, Roam 2.0 and Geomipmapping.
Are there any others which have feature sets drastically different from these 
three?

If I want to maintain backwards compatibility with older systems should I use 
an older algorithm (original roam) or do the newer ones still work even if you 
can't assume there's a fast GPU?

Is it inherently impossible to boil down a set of options for terrain into 
some kind of common subset? (e.g., all can be heigtmap based, all can deal 
with texture palletes, all have a similar error metric, etc.)

Thanks in advance

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